Date Created: Thu 07-Feb-2008

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    Discussion on umask options for Installing WebSphere.

    Well depending on how paranoid you may be in your environment and if your a true Unix die hard you would probably not like the default suggested umask of 022 for WebSphere installs.

    Often your hosting provider will set a default umask of 077 for the OS, however you can set a umask in your user profile that you are installing WAS. Is is recommended that you install WebSphere with the umask 022, but you could go to 027 to stop third party's from reading your logs.

    a umask is you access not'd. So 022 means that all new files will have 755 as their file permissions. Not'd means the inverse. We are using binary do the inverse of 7 is 0 and the inverse of 5 is two.

    Note: 755 means rwx for owner, r x for group and r x for other

    Before installing WebSphere you can verify the umask setting, issue the following command:

    umask

    To set the umask setting to 022, issue the following command:

    umask 022

    A umask of 22 will allow logs to be created where third party's (other) can read the logs. some WebSphere/Unix admins consider logs source code and thus use 077 or 027.

    Some more security conscious WebSphere installs may even go for 027 where access for other is not allowed until the administrator grants it upon request. This means no other third party can read the was logs unless the file permission's are changed with chmod.

Middleware Mentor - Steven Charles Robinson

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